The present invention relates to the field of audio processing and, more particularly, to the field of processing spatialized audio so that when the audio is reproduced into a set of headphones, the audio appears to be coming from a certain direction.
Headphones used for listening to audio typically have dual earpieces for listening to left and right audio channels. The headphones work fine when there is a two channel audio feed as one channel is sent to the left audio channel for listening by the left ear and the other channel is sent to the right audio channel for listening by the right ear.
However, the headphones do not work correctly when there are more than two audio channels as the various channels are mixed down to a single left and right pair of audio channels. For example, in a sound scape where there are sounds on the left, right, front and rear, all of those sounds would be mixed down to left and right audio channels. Thus, the audio reproduced by the headphones would not be an accurate representation of the three dimensional sound scape.
Moreover, current headphones do not take into account that the user wearing the headphones may move around so that the user's location within the sound scape is not accurately reproduced by the headphones.